This Is How You Get People Excited About Your Brand During The Holidays

The holidays are fast-approaching, which means one thing -- there are only a few more shopping days left until Christmas. With more and more startup retailers entering the fray, the competition for overwhelmed holiday shoppers’ attention gets tougher each year.

It’s not always easy to make your brand stand out in a crowd. Fortunately, help is on the way. Here are three startups helping brands grow while making the most out of the holiday season:

CC BY 2.0, javigutierrez, Flickr

Buzzoole

Brands are always looking for more awareness before the holidays so that consumers remember them when purchasing gifts for their loved ones. Buzzoole, a self-service influencer marketing platform, employs the power of word-of-mouth and automates the entire process of identifying, connecting, engaging, delivering and measuring valuable influencer marketing campaigns.

Users have a choice of either implementing a blog campaign, a social media campaign or a customized campaign combining both. They simply set a budget and the type of influencers they want involved in their campaign. Buzzoole then calculates the campaign’s expected performance, including estimated reach and ROI, and allows companies to monitor the campaign results in real-time.

“We give companies the tools to drive impactful earned media campaigns without wasting time and money,” says Fabrizio Perrone, co-founder and CEO of Buzzoole. “Now SMBs can use Buzzoole to set and reach goals for their campaigns in order to create extra buzz around their brands right before the holidays.”

BlueCore

While text messages and social media may be the communication tool of choice among family and friends, email still dominates marketing communication from retailers and brands to shoppers.

During the holiday season, client-targeted emails are more important than ever. Automated marketing startup Bluecore helps retailers instantly send shopping emails that seem to read customer’s minds, but actually just track their behavior.

Bluecore gives retailers’ marketing teams the ability to send emails with content based upon the actions of their customers, such as search activity and merchandise left abandoned in online carts. And it can do so within seconds versus the months it might take to sift through data on their own.

Bluecore is aligned with catalog inventories and can send out notifications about new merchandise and out-of-stock items. If a customer, for example, had viewed an item that is now 10 percent off, an email generated via the Bluecore platform would go to customers who already expressed interest.

Click to Tweet

Twitter is one of the most effective platforms to build buzz and awareness amongst potential users and customers. People flock to the platform specifically to find new ideas and information. For brands, that means an opportunity to get on new customers’ radar. One of the key ways to make sure your messages reach Twitter, is by providing a tweet button on your company’s site or blog.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. You may have great content on your site, but if it’s not in an easy-to-share format, you may be missing out on a huge potential Twitter audience.

Click to Tweet is designed to make sharing via Twitter dead simple. Just add the plugin to your site, take a sentence from your post and drop it into their tool. The service provides a super simple line of code that you can drop right into your site.

Now, when readers want to tweet something from your site, they can click the button and a Tweet is automatically prepared with the exact text you chose. Beyond that, the service let’s you easily track the linked text to see how effective your tweet was.

If you’re looking to create brand buzz with a bigger online presence, trying to target your customers with customized email, or looking to maximize the potential of Twitter this holiday season, there are numerous services to help you stand out. You just need to know where to look.

Do you know any platforms helping brands connect with users? Let me know in the comments.